When their dad looked at the salad, he shook his head at it. Everything was cut either too small or too big. The dressing somehow tasted sweet. Neither twin could agree on which one had accidentally added sugar instead of kosher salt. Ayanna couldn’t stop watching her mother. She was completely unsure of what it was that was so annoying to her. It reminded her of when for a while her dad had been dating someone seriously, and during that time her mom had refused to meet her. She would not go to soccer games or pick up Ayanna if “Miss Ashley” was there. By this point, they had not been together for six years. Even middle school Ayanna could not fathom this. She’d had an idea of what it meant to be in love and saw no interest, no longing, not even friendship, coming from her mom’s actions, even before Miss Ashley had started coming over for dinner. Her behavior during that time, and during this dinner years later, felt akin to acting out for attention. If that, too, was a part of being in love, then Ayanna figured, well, being in love was probably never going to be for her.

Olivia nudged Ayanna under the table.

Ayanna cleared her throat. She explained how much her upcoming church ceremony meant to her, tried to wax poetic about family, wove in some details about how these were precious times to have together, and in general managed to make both of her parents lift their eyebrows throughout. Her father’s were raised because he couldn’t help but find Ayanna inherently hilarious. The speech was terrible in its length and awkwardness, and she was being so weird, so unlike herself, that it felt like she was doing a bit. But he knew if he even neared a chuckle, she would be furious with him. Her mother’s were raised because she had come in with the full intention of saying no, this would be impossible. She had not allowed Olivia to go to their weird but kind Wiccan neighbor’s moonlight soul-binding ritual to her live-in partner. She had talked Olivia out of going to her friend Ruth’s bat mitzvah. No temples, no mosques, no sweat lodges, just good old-fashioned pews. There was a precedent here to keep Olivia’s path firmly set on being a good Christian. When she was an adult, she could make her own choices about faith experiences, but other faiths, well, those might be too confusing at this point in Olivia’s life. But the speech, the earnestness, the way Ayanna’s mouth had curled into a frown, how she kept saying Olivia was her best friend in the whole world, the stutter in the middle of the word importance, and the fact that for the first time in ages when she saw Ayanna, she didn’t see someone who felt a little too cool for her own good.